San Francico, August 15, 2004 –
Individuals who take their own life in pursuit of a cause are not
necessarily desperate loners. Research shows that most Palestinian
suicide bombers are trained by organizations and supported in their
action by family and their own community.

Sacrificing
oneself in pursuit of a cause appears to be against all basic human
instincts. However, the most paradoxical aspect in today's wave of
suicide attacks is the phenomenon of organized suicide bombing, where
tight cohesive groups sacrifice their best and most promising young
members.

Guillermina
Jasso and Eva Meyersson Milgrom in their empirical study "Social
Identity, Social Distance, and Palestinian Support for the Roadmap,"
analyze the social climate of these communities and why they demand and
support the ultimate sacrifice of their members. The authors assess
support for four of the provisions of the 2002 “Roadmap” peace
initiative: 1. Ending incitement against Israel by all official
Palestinian institutions, 2. Declaring an unequivocal end to violence
and terrorism and undertaking efforts to arrest, disrupt, and restrain
individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on
Israelis anywhere. 3. Cutting off funding and all other forms of
support for groups supporting and engaging in violence and terror, and
4. Restoring pre-Intifada links between Arab states and Israel. The
first three are directly pertinent to support for the tactic of suicide
attacks and the fourth evokes a more general support for peace.

The
study is based on a survey of Palestinians' attitudes towards the
Roadmap conducted in June 2003 by the Center for Policy and Survey
Research in Ramallah.

The
results from the empirical analysis show that better educated men and
women have more negative views of the Roadmap than those who are less
schooled. Attitudes toward the Roadmap vary as a function of an
individual’s social identity, as determined by educational status and
relative income. High educational status correlates with a negative
attitude to the Roadmap. However, men’s and women’s attitudes are
affected differently by income.

The
results support earlier findings of a strong correlation between
education and radicalization of people’s attitudes when income is low.
There may also be few opportunities for well-educated men and women to
find work that matches their training and skills. Higher-income men
favor the Roadmap, suggesting a link between earnings and developing
property or farming and selling to Israelis. Peace and political
stability are better for business than political unrest.

The
attitudes toward the Roadmap also vary strongly with the individual’s
geographic location. Geographic effects are significant for both women
and men; where one lives seems to strongly define the social context of
a Palestinian relative to others.

Living
in close proximity to Jewish settlers, for example, and seeing their
easier access to resources, water, roads, and electricity, may
influence the Palestinian attitudes negatively towards the Roadmap by
making more visible the distance between the social statuses of the two
groups. Another aspect of the social context defining Palestinian views
involves the fact that they may have been witnessing, to a larger
extent, the killing or the arrest of family members or neighbors. In
other words, these results point to the central fact that growing
social and economic inequalities between dependent societies negatively
influence attitudes toward the peace process.

Finally,
survey results for Palestinian women, though less clear-cut than the
results for men, suggest that women’s attitudes may be in transition.
Insurgency movements such as Hamas are also providers of health,
schooling, and, importantly, new opportunities for women.

New
opportunities cut a wide swath. For instance, according to interviews
with Hezbollah members, women whose husbands have become martyrs may
set up their own household with the support of the organization. That
is, they gain some independence vis-à-vis their extended families and
can decide for themselves about their children's schooling or the
grocery list.

This
paper will be presented at the 2004 ASA Annual Meeting in San Francisco
on Sunday, August 15, at 12:30 PM. The paper will appear as a chapter
in the forthcoming book The Market for Martyrs: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Suicide Bombing, edited by Eva M Meyersson Milgrom.

# # #

About the American Sociological AssociationThe American Sociological Association (www.asanet.org),
founded in 1905, is a non-profit membership association dedicated to
serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science
and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society.